Biography

Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early
Speeches of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull
(1837-1927)

Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World, was
fiction. Victoria Woodhull's Brave New World was to be
terrifyingly real.

As the first female Wall Street brokers, Victoria Woodhull
and her sister Tennie had reputations to protect. They
fretted about Tennie's well-publicized remark, "Many of the
best men in [Wall] Street know my power. Commodore
Vanderbilt knows my power." She had meant her skill as a
fortune teller, but the press quite rightly picked up hints
the attractive pair traded sexual favors for assistance in
their business. To make matters worse, in their magazine
the sisters had published articles promoting free love,
while distancing themselves from what was said. Taking the
offensive, Victoria moved, step by step, until in a speech
on November 20, 1871, she boldly proclaimed:

"And to those who denounce me for this I reply: 'Yes,
I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional,
and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or
as short a period as I can; to change that love every day
if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law
can frame any right to interfere.'"

Having come out of the closet, she had to
defend that lifestyle from those who warned that it meant
social ruin. In speeches across the country, she championed
a new society that, in its nineteenth-century context, was
remarkable similar to Huxley's 1932 classic, Brave New
World. Babies were not grown in bottles, but pregnant women
were to be treated as "laboring for society," "paid the
highest wages," and once the baby was weaned, "the fruit of
her labor will of right belong to society and she return to
her common industrial pursuits."

To critics who warned that free love meant children growing
up without parents, she replied that, "not more than one in
ten" mothers was competent, and that parents should be
replaced by the State because, "It is but one step beyond
compulsory education to the complete charge of children."
In her Brave New World, you could have all the sex you
could attract, but it would be impossible to be a genuine
parent. Victoria was among the first to call for the State
to eliminate social ills by controlling who could be a
parent.
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Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and
Writings of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull
(1837-1927)

During the last decades of her life, Victoria Woodhull
claimed to be the first of either sex to promote eugenics
throughout the United States and Great Britain. Even more
surprising, she claimed to have been doing so in the early
1870s, three decades before the cause was taken up in
earnest by Francis Galton, the eminent scientist that
eugenists claim as their founder.
It's obvious why eugenists have adjusted their history.
Francis Galton was the respectable, well-bred,
well-educated cousin of Charles Darwin. Victoria Woodhull
was a twice-divorced woman of uncertain breeding and
limited education, a woman with a reputation for sexual and
political radicalism. Unfortunately, historians have
followed the eugenists and credited Galton rather than
Woodhull.

This book investigates Woodhull's claim and presents
evidence from her published speeches that she was right.
She was speaking on eugenics to large audiences at least as
early as 1871, and by the mid-1870s eugenics, which she
called "stirpiculture" and "scientific propagation," formed
a major part of speeches she was making across the United
States and (after 1876) in Great Britain. By his own
admission, Galton did not take up the cause until after
1900. This book includes one of her earliest speeches in
favor of eugenics, newspaper reports of speeches from the
1870s, and five easily read facsimiles of speeches that
until now were available only in a few research libraries
in the world.

Even more important, what Woodhull said about eugenics
appealed to the same two groups that would later support
Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, wealthy and
highly educated women. Her speeches and writings laid the
eugenic foundation for the forced sterilization laws passed
in over thirty states from 1907 on. When the U.S. Supreme
Court declared such laws constitutional in 1927, the New
York Times reported that Woodhull praised the decision and
said she had "advocated that fifty years ago."

The Life of Toussaint L'Overture: The Negro Patriot
of Hayti
by John R. Beard

There's perhaps nothing more foolish than believing that
wisdom was born with us or, put another way, that those who
went before us have nothing to teach. In fact, improvements
in technology and a growing cultural sophistication have
little to do with the wisdom it takes to organize our
lives, discipline our thoughts, and set our goals in ways
that will not only achieve success, but the sort of success
that endures. Thinking otherwise does not mean we repeat
the mistakes of the past. It means we will make
mistakes--often painful and costly ones--that wiser
ancestors would never have made.

That's why this book is so important. It not only describes
events that took place some two centuries ago, it gives
them from the perspective of someone who died before anyone
now living was born. It is a voice out of the past, and one
that should be heard.

When the topic of this book, Toussaint L'Overture, was born
slavery seemed one the 'givens' of history, as much a part
of modern life as traffic congestion and noise. All great
civilizations, many educated people would have told you,
are built on sweated labor of slaves. Toussaint dared to
challenge that, not just with a belief that slaves should
be free, but with the far more radical idea that slaves had
within themselves the power to break their chains and
reorder their lives in freedom. He dared to demonstrate
that truth, not against a corrupt and decadent colonial
government, but against the very same French military
leaders and troops who had overrun Europe with ease. The
defeat he and his people handed the French was so great
that the nation abandoned its most valuable overseas
possession for a pitance rather than risk another colonial
war. That's why the United States owes its possession of
all the land west of the Alleganies and east of the
Mississipi River to a Haitian slave whose name most
Americans have never heard.

When this book was published in 1853, slavery was fighting
for its existence. Modern Britain never permitted slavery
on its shores and, after a long and bitter political
struggle, banned slavery in its colonies. In the sort of
unilateral projection of force that is the prerogative of
superpowers, the navies of Britain and, oddly enough, of
the United States sought to end the seaborne slave trade
that remained, particularly along the coasts of Africa. But
the United States, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery
remained. This book was written to destroy the prejudices
upon which that slavery was built, using as an example the
marvelous life of Toussaint L'Overture. Here's how the
book's author stated his purpose.

I am about to sketch the history and character of one of
those extraordinary men, whom Providence, from time to
time, raises up for the accomplishment of great, benign,
and far-reaching results. I am about to supply the
clearest evidence that there is no insuperable barrier
between the light and the dark-coloured tribes of our
common human species. I am about to exhibit, in a series
of indisputable facts, a proof that the much
misunderstood and downtrodden negro race are capable of
the loftiest virtues, and the most heroic efforts. I am
about to present a tacit parallel between white men and
dark men, in which the latter will appear to no
disadvantage. Neither eulogy, however, nor disparagement
is my aim, but the simple love of justice. It is a
history--not an argument--that I purpose to set forth. In
prosecuting the narrative, I shall have to conduct the
reader through scenes of aggression, resistance, outrage,
revenge, bloodshed, and cruelty, that grieve and wound
the hear, and exciting the deepest pity for the
sufferers, raise irrepressible indignation against
ambition, injustice and tyranny--the scourges of the
world, and specially the sources of complicated and
horrible calamities to the natives of Africa.--From the
introduction to Chapter 1

Margaret Sanger was one of the most influential women of
the twentieth century and for many decades her name was a
household word. The organization she founded, Planned
Parenthood, has received hundreds of millions of dollars
from the U.S. government and draws generously from the
world's largest foundations. With close ties to similar
organizations around the world, its influence is truly
global. Yet few Americans know anything about Margaret
Sanger, the ideals to which she dedicated her life, or the
purpose for which Planned Parenthood was founded.

Unlike any book that has come before, this new study of
Margaret Sanger takes her seriously as a thinker and
provides a definitive reference to what she believed. It
places what she said and did in the proper historical
context with no less than thirty chapters of prologue to
prepare readers readers to understand the concluding twelve
chapters, which are the full text of Sanger's own
best-selling 1922 classic, The Pivot of
Civilization, introduced by the noted science fiction
writer, H. G. Wells.

To give one example, Sanger constantly clashed with a once
influential movement that fretted about something called
'race suicide.' A typical biography of Sanger might have a
few paragraphs in which the author gives an opinion about
that movement that's likely to be only partially accurate.
This book does not leave its readers captive to the
scholarly fashions and prejudices of the moment. It takes
you back to the time when race suicide was fiercely debated
and lets you listen in on what was said. It has no less
than eleven chapters quoting extensively from all sides of
that once heated debate. It takes you back to the first
written mention of the term and shows how the concept
expanded, year by year, until it became a weapon to alter
what was being taught at elite women's colleges and to
change what was expected of educated, professional women.
Those century-old issues still affect how present-day
feminism views the world for good and ill.

These are not isolated quotes that might be taken out of
context. Each writer is allowed to argue his point of view
in great detail, only irrelevant distractions have been
removed. Two of these preliminary chapters are long
out-of-print articles by Sanger herself and two are by her
arch-foe in the race suicide debate, President Theodore
Roosevelt. You would have to spend weeks searching through
a large university library to find even part of what's in
this provocative book. That makes this book an excellent
resource for students with research papers to be written.

Why, you ask, is that long ago clash important? That's like
asking why slavery, outlawed almost a century and a half
ago, matters to race relations. When you hear a feminist
warn of those who intend to "force motherhood" on unwilling
women, knowingly or not, she is reacting to that once
heated debate. And when she complains that men simply
"don't get it" about reproductive issues, she is referring,
yet again, to an era when who would and would not have
children was an all too public issue. You see that in H. G.
Well's own introduction to Pivot, where he notes
that as a man interested in promoting a "New Civilization,"
he can't attach the same importance Sanger does to birth
control. This book brings that once familar debate out of
its closet and into the cleansing light of day. And, most
important of all, it helps you to understand contemporary
debates about issues such as abortion and sex. Today's
events are based largely on past event.. What happened then
influences how each of us thinks and acts today. Understand
that, and we better understand ourselves and those around
us.

Quotes from Margaret Sanger in The Pivot of
Civilization

"But there is a special type of philanthropy or
benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as
a federal program and as worthy of private endowment,
which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than
any other. This concerns itself directly with the
function of maternity, and aims to supply gratis medical
and nursing facilities to slum mothers."

"On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the
reestablishment of the balance between the fertility of
the 'fit' and the 'unfit.' The birth-rate among the
normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity, is to
be increased by awakening among the 'fit' the realization
of the dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to
the reckless breeding among the 'unfit.' . . . . But the
scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this
restraint of fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight
and is a conscious effort to elevate standards of living
for the family and the children of the responsible--and
possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The
appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for
the benefit of the nation or the race, or any other
abstraction, will fall on deaf ears."

"Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to
produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but
to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing
progress we see now making in the externals of life. . .
. Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed
child, every congenitally tainted human being brought
into this world is of infinite importance to that poor
individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the
rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one
way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."